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The Church 7a: The Essence of Biblical Worship, Part One

Biblical
worship is best understood through what the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple
teaches us. What is found there for the
Jewish people represents, in essence, what also constitutes Christian worship
of the one God in three Persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy of Holies helps us to understand
worship of God as

1.acknowledging
the worth of God’s holy commandments for His covenant people through obedience
and repentance;

2.being aware
of and responding to His glory and holiness; and

3.giving
thanks for and receiving His mercy and forgiveness.

Each of these might be discussed
in regard to the Temple imagery and symbolism, what this means for worship,
where this view of worship challenges certain contemporary practices, and how
this understanding of worship relates to mission.

A.Worship as
Honouring God by Obeying His Holy Commandments

Imagery of Worship: An Altar of Incense and the
Ark of the Covenant

In the Holy
of Holies of the Jewish tabernacle in the wilderness and the Jerusalem Temple
that replaced it, a golden altar for incense, representing the worship offered
before the One God, stood before the ark of the covenant. The ark of the covenant contained three
things: the tablets of God’s Law, a golden urn holding manna, and Aaron’s rod
that budded (Hebrews 9.4). Aaron’s rod
was in the ark as a warning to those rebelling and complaining against God
(Numbers 17.8, 10). God had given manna
to sustain the Israelites forty years in the wilderness. A small amount of it was kept in the ark of
the covenant (Exodus 16.31-35) to remember that God’s people live not only by
bread but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Deuteronomy
8.3). The Ten Commandments on tablets of
stone were the basis for the words that came from God’s mouth for His people.

Thus the ark
represents God’s holiness with regard to His commandments—commandments that
define what it means to be God’s own treasured possession. The ark contained God’s Law for His
people. It contained God’s warning not to rebel. And it contained God’s reminder that His people live by every word that proceeds from His mouth. The holiness
of this ark is seen in a story that took place when it was being
transported. When the ark began to slide
off the cart, a man by the name of Uzzah reached out his hand to steady
it. When he touched the ark, he
immediately died because of the LORD’s anger (2 Sam. 6.7; 1 Chr. 13.10). With the image of the ark for understanding
worship, we come to see worship of God as acknowledging that we live in God’s world according to His laws and should not disobey. Biblical worship, like Biblical wisdom, is
the fear of God, and, as Biblical understanding is the departure from evil (Job
28.12, 20; Ps. 111.10), like Christian worship.
The end of the matter of philosophical speculation on the meaning of
life, says the author of Ecclesiastes, is this: ‘Fear God, and keep
his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone’ (Eccl. 12.13). Likewise, to worship God is obey Him as His
children.

Worship and the Holy Commandments of God

We might learn from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
In it, the order of service for Holy Communion begins with praying the
Lord’s Prayer and a collect (brief prayer), and then the priest is instructed
to rehearse the Ten Commandments. The
people, kneeling, are instructed to ask God for mercy for their transgressions
and for grace to keep the Law. Moreover,
the first and second greatest commandments of our Lord are also rehearsed—to
love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and to love our neighbours as
ourselves. Then the priest says (using
an older, 1789 version), ‘O Almighty Lord, and everlasting God, vouchsafe, we
beseech thee, to direct, sanctify, and govern, both our hearts and bodies, in
the ways of thy laws, and in the works of thy commandments….’ While not followed everywhere in Anglican
circles to this degree, the focus at the beginning of this part of the service
is, as it were, on the ark of the covenant: God’s Law. Worship that honours God is worship that
acknowledges the fact that being God’s people means being under his
commandments. It understands that
repentance and mercy are appropriate responses to the God who gives us his Law
so that we might live. In worship, there
is a place for recognizing our human sinfulness, and there is a place to pray
for God’s mercy.

Perhaps the two classic passages illustrating the failure of worship due to the failure to obey God’s commandments are
Isaiah 58 and Jeremiah 7. In both, God’s
people are depicted as following a form of obedience but not a real
obedience. Isaiah says of the house of
Jacob that ‘day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they
were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of
their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to
God’ (Isaiah 58.2). Jeremiah says,

Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear
falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not
known, 10 and then come and
stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, "We
are safe!"-- only to go on doing all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called
by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching,
says the LORD (Jer. 7.9-11).

This second passage is one Jesus quotes when he
cleanses the Temple (Matthew 21.13).
Jesus’ concern with ‘cheap grace’ worship at the Temple has to do with
people who find in their worship a too easy access to God’s blessing despite
their sinful behaviours. Even as he
challenged the worship at the Jewish Temple, he would today challenge worship
in many churches where sin is taken rather lightly but people, thinking
themselves ‘covered’ by God’s abundant grace, do not truly repent and live
righteously. As Micah says,

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" 8 He has told you, O mortal, what
is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.7-8).

What Christians add to this understanding is not a
new license for sin because of God’s abundant grace through Jesus’ sacrificial
death for our sins but both a forgiving grace and a transforming grace in Jesus’ sacrificial death for us. Jesus not only dies for our sins, but we die
to sin in him and are raised to new life with him (Rom. 6.1-14).

A Challenge for Contemporary Worship

Contemporary worship in many churches does not
always follow this focus on God’s commandments, human sinfulness and
confession, and the grace of forgiveness.
One reason appears to be that some people are uncomfortable with this
emphasis on God’s Law and human sin.
They choose not to read uncomfortable passages dealing with human
depravity, such as Rom. 1.18-3.20 (check your lectionary, if you use one, to
see if it is there!). God is seen more
as a jolly old chap, someone who empathizes with our human challenges and
failings, who will not hold his Law over our heads but wants to pour out his
love to and through us. This view of God
sees God as a parent who is a little embarrassed over his harsh treatment of us
when we were young but now recognizes that we’ve turned out pretty well after
all and are grown up enough to make our own decisions. Thus the holiness of God’s Law is denied as
the commandments are relaxed, and so, also, the very notion of sin is
relaxed. The closest one comes to
confessing actual sin is confessing that we have not been fervent enough in
caring for the environment or treating our enemies and neighbours with divine
love or on seeking justice for the latest social concern. Well and good, but sin is kept ‘out there’—a
failure of sufficient action by social activists more than as a condition of
the heart that delights to break God’s Law.
The commandments of God, on this view, are, if not outdated, more a
general and suggestive approach for life; we had best critically evaluate them before
embracing them too fully and readily.

A more typically Evangelical view in worship is
also disturbed by too much of an emphasis on sin. It understands that God has overcome our sins
in Christ and no longer counts them against us.
We are not saved by works of the Law but by grace through faith in Jesus. And so, the emphasis on sin and repentance is
played down as a part of worship even if theologically acknowledged—let us
rather get on with celebrating God’s mercy, forgiveness, and grace. Yet this can—indeed has!—led to a diminished
focus on the holiness of God and His commandments. Instead, a more cuddly and fatherly God is
worshipped, and we see ourselves less as sinners in the hands of an angry God
than as scallywags who’ve had a little too much fun.

The General Confession of sin in the daily Anglican
Morning Prayer, however, not only speaks of erring, straying, and following the
‘devices and desires of our own hearts,’ but it also states outright, ‘We have
offended against thy holy laws.’ (One
can only marvel at the great contradiction when, despite this focus in the
liturgy, so many churches in this tradition in the West have celebrated their disobedience of God’s
Law in sexual ethics.) Moreover, a
weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper reminds us of Jesus’ sacrifice for our
sins in a way that no other act of worship does. We are set squarely in front of the cost of
our sins with the reminders of Jesus’ body and blood given for us in the
elements of bread and wine, while at the same time we joyfully receive the
forgiveness of sins and reconciliation to God in Christ Jesus.

The ‘three songs and a sermon’ form of
Evangelicalism that has become so popular in non-denominational churches, along
with certain denominational churches, typically undercuts if not totally
dismisses any act of worship that focusses our minds and hearts on our own
sinfulness before a holy God who has given us His commandments so that we might live. If we pass too quickly to sing and reflect
upon God’s grace, we cheapen that grace by ignoring the gravity of our own sin. But so great a sacrifice of Christ Jesus, the
Son of God, challenges us to appreciate human sinfulness—including our own—and life
lived apart from God’s rule. These
typical Evangelical worship services also reduce the amount of Scripture that
is heard by the people in worship, and they have one or two short prayers that
carry little substance and are easily missed, being more about transitional
moments in the service than prayers from the heart of the people of God.

In the contemporary West, as society recoils from
the notion of sin altogether, the Church can either succumb to such cultural
influences on its own theology and practices or stand up as a counter-cultural
witness. The beginning of such a witness
lies first in worship, in hearing God’s
Word (reading Scripture and being instructed by it), repenting of breaking God’s commandments and living for ourselves,
and receiving His forgiveness. By not making such repentance a feature of
our worship, we signal to the world that our separation from its ways is more
about our own claim to superiority than about our own brokenness in sin and
reception of a forgiveness available to all.

The first dimension of Biblical worship, then, is
to (1) acknowledge God’s commandments (the tablets of the Law) as though we
were standing in the Holy of Holies before the ark of the covenant, (2) heed
His warning of judgement to all who rebel against Him (represented by Aaron’s
rod), and (3) feed upon the manna of His word that we might live. Thus we pray, ‘give us this day our daily
bread’ (both physical and spiritual), ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us, and deliver us from evil.’ This is itself worship, acknowledging that
God is worthy of our obedience.

Without elaborating too much here, the presence of
the tablets of the Law also reminds us of the place for instruction in God’s
Word as part of our worship. Teaching
from Scripture in a service of worship leads to a response of conviction before
our holy God or a response of praise and thanksgiving to God. The more we turn teaching into rhetorical
flourishes—‘sermons’—in the Greek style of public speaking instead of teaching
of Scripture, the more the focus is on the rhetorical skills of the minister,
self-help messages for the audience in the coming week, or political agendas of
interested parties. The church will be
well-served by getting away from the idea of preaching in the sense it is so
often practiced and by returning to a more ‘synagogue’ understanding of teaching
the Scriptures as part of worship. Our
concern for the message during worship is not to be, ‘What application does the
minister have for us of Scripture this week in his engaging message?’ but ‘What
does Scripture teach us that we might obey and give glory to God?’

Mission, Worship, and Obeying God

Worship as acknowledging God’s worthiness to be
obeyed translates into mission in two ways.
One is within the congregation at worship, the other is that mission is
a form of worship. These points come out
in Paul’s two canonical letters to the Corinthian churches. First, Paul understands congregational
worship as having a dimension of mission.
This can be seen when he says that partaking of Communion is a
‘proclamation of the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor. 11.26). What Paul as an apostle does in proclaiming
the Gospel of Jesus in the public squares of the cities where he ministered,
the churches do in worship during the Eucharist. Also, as the gathered church meets together
and hears, along with any unbelievers who have joined them, the words from God
in prophecy, ‘the secrets of the unbeliever's heart are disclosed,’ and
‘that person will bow down before God and worship him, declaring, "God is
really among you" (1 Cor. 14.25).

Second, mission is a form of worship. Paul sees himself in his ministry as a
libation being poured out (2 Tim. 4.6).
The imagery of the Temple’s golden altar for incense features as an
image for mission in 2 Corinthians. Paul
says,

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal
procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from
knowing him. 15 For we are
the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who
are perishing; 16 to the one
a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.
Who is sufficient for these things? 17
For we are not peddlers of God's word like so many; but in Christ we speak as
persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence (2
Corinthians 2.14-17).

Thus worship is missional in the congregation
insofar as it reflects on the death of Christ for our sins and involves God’s
prophetic word to us such that we are convicted of our sins. And, as in 2 Cor. 2.14-17, mission is itself
a worshipful service unto God, as the missionary is an incense in society that
is the ‘aroma of Christ to God,’ pleasant to those receiving the Gospel and
unpleasant to those rejecting it. The
altar of incense, whether congregational worship or missional service as
worship, always appears together with the ark of the covenant, challenging us
all: ‘Will we, God’s covenant people, live by His Law?’

[Two further articles to follow on worship as awareness of God's holiness and glory and worship as thanksgiving and reception of God's mercy.]